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Monday, 26 June 2017

Movie Review: The Promise (2017)

Even without getting into the premise of today’s film, this
has the kind of main casting that is designed to make audiences froth in
excitement. You’ve got Oscar Isaac, a true rising star who has been attached to
critical and audience darlings for several years straight at this point and has
even entered meme status thanks to his… interesting dance sequence from Ex Machina. Next to him, there’s Charlotte Le Bon, whom I’ll admit hasn’t exactly
wowed me with her latest features, but quite frankly, she’s more than due for a
proper-good production. And then there’s Christian Bale, the modern king of
method acting who is well-known by this point for how seriously he takes his work. As much as I know better than I’d like how easily a promising
cast can be cut down by a wasteful story, rest assured, this isn’t one of those
occasions. This is The Promise.

The plot: Budding doctor Mikael (Oscar Isaac) travels to
Constantinople to start his medical training. While there, he meets dancer Ana
(Charlotte Le Bon) and her partner Chris (Christian Bale), an American journalist
reporting on the Armenian-Turkish conflict going on at the time. As open
hostilities continue to escalate, and Mikael and Chris find themselves thrown
even deeper into the conflict, the three of them need to find a way to get out
of the country before things get worse.

In light of my opening spiel, it is seriously relieving that
the cast here is as strong as it is, and not just from our main cast. Oscar
Isaacs is brilliant, managing his character’s endless stream of tragedies
remarkably well while also channelling virtue without it coming across as
melodramatic. Well, not melodramatic to the point of being ineffective, at
least. Le Bon, while admittedly hideously miscast as an Armenian (something
that even the film itself can’t help but poke holes into), still does very well
alongside her co-stars and just showing raw emotion on her own. Bale is fantastic
too, playing a man-of-action war journalist who manages to wield his
character’s conviction without having the fact that he is playing an American
detract from the Armenians and their struggle. Jean Reno plays a French
military officer, because of course he does, Marwan Kenzari as Mikael’s friend
Emre gives a very solid perspective to the story as a Turk roped into the war
against his will, James Cromwell as a U.S. ambassador only gets a single scene
but he absolutely nails it and possibly steals the show from the already
incredible cast around him, and Rade Šerbedžija, again in a small role, gives a
rousing performance as the mayor of an Armenian village who becomes a
galvanizing force for good. As you’ll see when I get further into this, that’s
a bit of a theme with the characters here.

It’s a war film, so I hope you like disturbing and
harrowing-as-fuck imagery because this film’s got it in spades. Selecting a
lesser-known conflict (the Armenian genocide) within a war that doesn’t get as
much coverage as its younger Nazi-soaked sibling already puts this film in a
nice niche amongst its contemporaries. However, it manages to go beyond that
once the scale and scope of the whole event starts to come into focus. Starting
out on Mikael’s slightly problematic goal of becoming a doctor (paid for through
a marriage-of-convenience), the film’s willingness to show the terrors of war
builds and builds rather steadily throughout, reaching a deafening roar once we
get to scenes of mass slaughter and viciously underhanded actions taken by the
Turkish officials. In fact, more than the stomach churns, it’s the breadth of
the film’s gaze that’s really worthy of note. Even though this still focuses on
a relatively small event in a far larger conflict, this film manages to bring
that larger conflict into the film’s narrative without ever really deviating
from that event. By isolating one part, it emphasizes the whole in a way that
very few modern war films have managed.

But what about the love triangle? You know, that thing that
Rotten Tomatoes apparently thought took precedent over the actual point of the story? Well, not only is it
of a higher grade that I’ve been seeing in films lately, it’s also bolstered by
how sharply defined the characters involved are. Mikael may have started off on
a weird foot with the sham marriage for the dowry, but later on, his
determination to make that very relationship work manages to balance it out.
Not only that, as the war makes him lose more and more of the life he once had,
his apparent want for vengeance never outweighs his want to help others. Ana,
once properly set within the love triangle between Mikael and Chris, never gets
invested in it to the point where it could result in far worse things
happening. It’s strange that I should have to point this out, but her
attachment to both men never ends up trumping her doing the right thing.
Probably helps that what could be considered this film’s third-act-breakup is
handled very refreshingly, as no party involved ends up letting their emotions
override the far bigger problems at hand. And as for Chris, every time he
showed up on-screen, I kept being reminded of a line from Warren Ellis’
Transmetropolitan: “Journalism is just a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it,
but if you aim it right, that’s all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a
kneecap off the world.” He ends up embodying that understanding of how powerful information can be, and why it should be reported on. As a result, he is shown risking death at numerous turns
just to make sure that the story gets told. He also has a scene where he
tells a few Turkish (and German) officials that they are up to no good to their
faces, a moment that made me re-realize just how amazing an actor Christian
Bale is with the right material. Between the three of them, and a few snippets
of dialogue that seem to directly commentate on certain sillier moments in the
film (such as a street fight where Ana tries attacking a Turkish soldier with heads
of lettuce), they create a strong foundation for the film’s true purpose to
shine through.

Back when I reviewed Our Kind Of Traitor, I was absolutely
floored by the sheer sense of good that came from the characters and their
actions; inspired is a severe understatement, upon leaving that screening.
Honestly, I have much the same reaction here, except it seems to serve a far
grander purpose this time around. Even with the inclusion of French, German and
American characters, the focus always stays on the conflict between the Turks
and the Armenians; specifically, how one hideously affects the existence of the
other. Once Mikael is shown the full extent of the enemy’s cruelty, the sense
of fighting against one’s oppressors starts to grow, embodied by numerous
characters who are willing to give their lives just so that others may live.
Now, given my railing against similar martyrdom in Silence earlier this year,
this may sound a tad hypocritical on my part but here’s the thing: Being a
martyr has actual purpose here. Rather than one’s feeling of pride or need to
appease someone else, our protagonists operate mainly to prevent others from
being killed. It’s altruism that does lead to melodrama at times, considering
the brutality and heightened emotion that gets juggled around for the last half
of the film, but the acting keeps it from becoming too overblown. It also
manages to carry a very specific song of pride throughout for the Armenian
people, embodied in the film’s tonal whiplash of an epilogue. Yeah, it may feel
out-of-place next to the tragedy that preceded it, but its intent still rings
true and, considering the aforementioned lack of familiarity most audiences
would have with this story, feels like it deserves to be seen. And quite
frankly, this film is just that good that it indeed deserves to be seen.

All in all, this is truly powerful cinema. Thanks to a
strong cast, where even the bit parts leave an indelible impression by film’s
end, and writing that employs both well-defined characters and smooth pacing,
this has all the sorrow and eventual hope and triumph that you should want from
a war film. It’s kind of sad that this film is going down as weakly as it is,
both commercially and critically, and even sadder that Armenian genocide
deniers have been trying to further sabotage the film’s online reception,
because I cannot recommend this film highly enough. It’s better than The Fate Of The Furious, as all the overblown 50-car pile-ups in the world can’t match
something with this kind of emotional intensity. However, even though I really
love the effort put into the characterization here, it still doesn’t wow me as
much as the miracle work put into T2: Trainspotting. Making me like someone
like Mikael? Easy. Making me like a beast like Franco Begbie? Now that is impressive.